


Fire and Daggers: A Hunger Games Oneshot Collection

by sakura_freefall



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Boys and girls can be friends without romance guys, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Hunger Games, One Shot Collection, Oneshots under 1000 words, TBOSAS Spoilers- Minor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:08:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26003191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sakura_freefall/pseuds/sakura_freefall
Summary: Stories of Panem's past, present, future, and everything in between. Requests welcome~ all oneshots are 1,000 words or less.
Relationships: Annie Cresta/Finnick Odair, Cato & Clove (Hunger Games), Cato/Clove (Hunger Games), Haymitch Abernathy/Effie Trinket, Katniss Everdeen & Johanna Mason, Katniss Everdeen & Peeta Mellark, Katniss Everdeen & Primrose Everdeen, Katniss Everdeen & Rue, Katniss Everdeen/Peeta Mellark, Lucy Gray Baird & Sejanus Plinth
Kudos: 20





	1. Unforgettable

There is a hardness to her face. It has always been there, but it has been sharpened like rock to a chisel's scrape. Her eyes have blades that you could cut yourself on. She is like ice, untouchable, because if you touch her, she could shatter.

She sees the sunset, but she doesn't feel the warm wind. She can hardly see the colors, because part of her will always be in the arena. She will always feel the people lying in wait, in the shadows. She will always smell the faintest trace of blood. She can hardly touch the knives that were her survival. All she sees in them is the stains of the arena, and the beet stains become blood in the moonlight.

There is a part of her who loves it, knows that there is power in being able to hurt people, and she craves it, but she also hates that part of herself because she knows it's the part of her that's the most broken.

Her whole life had led up to this. Winning the Games. For as long as she could remember, this was all she knew. She had molded her heart around it, and it turned her into stone. And stone cannot melt. It cannot yield. It only can stay or shatter. 

**...**

His face is a mask, and the mask is marble. He has learned to shore up the cracks, to let nothing crack the paper-thin casting. He is a statue, and statues do not laugh, do not cry, do not feel.

He is not allowed to feel.

She was so good at it. Only her eyes betrayed her, eyes that are green like the forest, and within which hid anger and pride and fear and just the tiniest bit of happiness. She could set her face and never flinch. He's never seen her cry. He almost believes that she can't cry, like she's a creature from some other world where everything is sharp and harsh and washed in moonlight.

He is not like her. The trainers say so. He is too impulsive. He lets fear and anger and rage blind him, and he can forget himself in a red-tinted world of rage. He can break down, and he is too scorched, too tired to put himself back together again. In spite of the mask, he feels.

He is fire. She is ice. He is uncontained. Unobtainable. Nothing can tie him down. She is unobtainable too, but she obtains herself. Every word she says is baited, barbed, and carefully considered. He knew he would sit on the victor's chair someday, but he never dreamed it would be with her.

Winning the games for him meant nothing and everything. A shiny plaque, scars that would fade and scars that would never heal. A smile and a thank-you and a silent train ride home. A cheering crowd that he didn't know how to hear.

It had taken everything from him.

**...**

She jumps at his approach, turns around, bristles like a startled bird. He does not touch her, does not assume she isn't lost in her own world. But he looks at her and she doesn't quite smile, but there is almost something in her eyes. They hurt each other every time they collide, but they are like a whetstone to a blade, growing stronger and sharper each time. And they are empty. Empty because the arena has taken everything from them but each other. They know nothing of soft sunlight or laughter or tears that fell freely.

But it takes time. They see monsters in themselves already. They look at their hands and see weapons of murder. They are not alive, and not dead. A foot in each world.

They have seen so much.

He sees the smiling girl collapsing to the ground surrounded by venom, and there is nothing he can do.

She sees the horror in the boy's eyes as the arrow enters his throat.

They see the little girl fall with a spear in her stomach, the boy with the limp caught in a forest fire. The screams and the cries and the hissing of something almost snakelike. The crystal cameras and the empty smiles.

But they can break and heal and fall apart and fall back together.

They are human, and they are surrounded by stone and rock and blades, but they did not become them.

Cato. Clove. District Two. Unbreakable not because they cannot be broken, but unbreakable because they can heal.

Victors not only of the arena, but of themselves.

They are many things, but above all else, good and bad and scarred, they are unforgettable.


	2. One Of Us

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Johanna Mason meets the other Victors, and for the first time, she isn't so alone. Part One.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Johanna content is always fun to write. Especially her strange-but-understandable way she interacts with others. I also have this headcanon that Johanna won her games really young- it goes with the while play-it-weak strategy- and that's partially why she still carries so much heavy scar tissue.

She's fourteen summers old. Last year she was thirteen. At thirteen summers old, she drove an axe into another kid's head. At thirteen she watched as someone bled to death at her feet.

She still feels it, the whispering cry of _monster, monster,_ _monster_ and she knows it's true, that there is no other word for someone who killed five people, some of which could probably be called cold-blood murder, but in the arena it isn't murder, it's survival, and there's only survival. You do what you have to, but what nobody tells her is that the hardest part comes after. Victor. Monster. Same thing. Same thing.

From early on, she could feel something different about her. How when other children cried, she screamed, and when the others teased her and mocked her, she didn't run for the teachers, she teased and mocked right back, only louder. And more recently, when the boys started getting a little too nice, she didn't hesitate to hit them where it counted. The urge to fight picked at her like an itch in her bones, and when she couldn't find an argument, she started one. If she was a bit small and scrawny for her age, what did it matter? Her tongue could kill anyone, and if it couldn't, people underestimated the strength of jagged fingernails.

Obviously, she wasn't stupid, no matter what the others said. When her name was called- one slip out of thousands, some said it was rigged, that she'd been marked as a troublemaker, a rebel- she knew she had no chance against the Ones and Twos who knew fifty ways to make you bleed to death, and it didn't help that she was thirteen summers old and not especially attractive, with her sharp, scrawny frame and pronounced nose, and that she would be labeled as dead meat early on. But rather than give up the way that the others from the outlying districts did, cry and sniffle and wait to die, Johanna planned, and she knew her best chance, ironically was to come off as completely and utterly useless.

It was hard, and Johanna had to scramble every bit of willpower to make it happen. Pretending she was afraid of the big, strong eighteen-summer-olds, not quite comedically much, but just enough that she looked like she was valiantly trying to hide her fear, and failing because she was a weakling from Seven, refusing to hold any of the blades, even convincing her mentor- a sixty-year-old lady named Kathy who had a loose tongue and a tendency to be untrustworthy- things that served her well in the Games but not in the aftermath- that she was useless, which forfeited most of the sponsors and support, but she could kill with a sharp stick just as well as a polished Capitol-branded longsword. Dead was dead, and only Careers cared about making a show of it. Sniffling through her interview, shaking in front of the Gamemakers, what the people back home must think of her, especially the old bullies, seeing snappy spiky Johanna making a fool of herself, but none of that mattered. Only survival. You can't prove someone wrong if you're dead.

Killing the cocky, arrogant Four was the first. And guilty as it made her feel, Johanna felt some of that old spark of satisfaction coming back to her, watching him loom over her with a sword, waiting, playing up the brutal angle- in his interview, he'd sworn to _kill everyone, kill them all-_ and he had to be manhandled off the stage by Peacekeepers, dead, but she didn't let herself get sucked down that hole, that was what made tributes mad, and the Capitol didn't like letting the insane ones win, she formed a brief alliance with the boy from Ten, until he'd attacked her with a knife in the middle of the night and she was forced to beat him to the ground until she could reach the axe- and the others, quick bouts of fear and guilt, but she needed to survive, and through it all, she swore to _make them pay._

So when Johanna Mason of District Seven made it out of the sixty-seventh annual Hunger Games, she thought it was over. But it wasn't. The Victory Tour. The senseless killing and dying never ended, and each year she ended up back at the Capitol. Around and around.

She hadn't expected the other victors to receive her kindly, only Finnick had seemed civil, but that was Finnick and he was nice to everyone whether he liked them or not, Haymitch Abernathy was drunk more often than not, the Career victors aloof and self-important, and nobody had a place for a half-starved, angry District Seven.

What she didn't know is that being forced into a sadistic gladiatorial blood-fight does something to a person that only others who've done the exact same thing and suffered the exact same horrors can share, and that family borne of blood and bone and scars was the strongest kind of family.

And for her, it would soon be the only kind of family.


	3. What If? (Pts. 1-3)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three 100-world drabbles of what would've happened if someone else had won.

_**1F~**_

She smiles on the stage. The dress is gold, like her name. The people cheer, and their eyes are hungry. She smiles at them.

She knows. She's always known. And she hates every second of it. She smiles as the cameras show blood. Smiles until she's sure her face has frozen.

She smiles for the people who will devour her whole, and she will smile at them too.

Inside she is screaming and sobbing, she is ugly, broken, a scared little girl.

But she smiles for the cameras and her world descends into sparkles and sugar and frilly, empty nothing.

_**1M~** _

His whole life was leading up to this moment.

Every day. Every minute. Spears in dummies, spears in little girls' stomachs, soaked with blood, soaked with tears. Ashes of fires, and bruises and cuts and hours spent crying until he had nothing left to cry. Murder and betrayal and unspeakable, horrible acts.

He regrets none of it. Maybe in another time he would, but he is here, and he has everything he ever, ever wanted. He has no time for sentimentality. No time for anything but glory. He grins, laughs, and his laugh is tinged with insanity.

He regrets nothing.

_**3M~** _

This wasn't supposed to happen. The lights are too bright- how are they so bright? Nothing like the incandescent bulbs back home. He counts in his mind, pulls up years of memories. _1\. 2. 4. 8. 16. 32. 64._

He still doesn't know how. But he's here, he's alive and the blue-haired man is asking a question that he can't quite hear. And he wants is to see his family again, to be back home, to pretend none of this ever happened.

_128\. 256. 312..._

His mind descends into perfect spirals of madness, bombs and lighting. 

He forgets the game.


	4. Meadow Ghosts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sejanus and Lucy Gray watch as Katniss and Peeta's children play in the Meadow.

The meadow is green, with hints of colorful wildflowers, and the sun turns the grass almost yellow. Two people stand, just out of the shadow of a tree, watching. Nearby, a family plays, a young man and woman, and two small children.

"Wow," says Sejanus, turning his head to face the girl next to him.

"You're never one for eloquence, Sejanus. But you're right this time. Wow."

"Sixty-five years. Too long." He shakes his head.

"Better late than never, they say. It ain't over til the mockingjay sings."

"You're right. Look at them, they're almost happy."

The family consists of a woman in a yellow dress with long, black hair and olive skin, her face lined with frownmarks but for now smiling, a stocky man with dirty-blonde hair and a wide, kind expression. The little girl has his blonde curls but the woman's sharp eyes as she races across the field laughing. The boy is younger, barely past a toddler, with dark hair and chubby legs. The parents watch them, chastising them not to trip over a rock, or go too close to that creek, and they twine their hands around each others', talking quietly.

"Ow!" There's a shriek of pain, and for a moment, they are thrown back into the war zone, watching as people fought and killed and died. But this is only a little cry, the youngest boy having tripped over a jutting-out root.

Lucy Gray, all to her credit, is there in a heartbeat, and the little one looks at her with an expression of confusion and fear. "Who- who are you?"

She chuckles. "I'm Lucy Gray. Come now, nobody's going t'hurt ya. This is my friend, Sejanus."

"S'a weird name. Se-jan-us. Sounds... sounds like the Cap-tol names." He looks confused, like he's trying to form words.

"That's cause he's Capitol. Well, not really. He just lived there a while. Not all Capitol people are bad, y'know."

"Mamma says some of'em are. Says that they were mean to her and Papa and- and that's why sometimes he can't talk right for a bit. But I guess you guys're one of the nice ones. Like Auntie Effie. What district are you from, Lucy?"

She smiles, a little sadly. "Ain't from no district. I'm a Covey, we're travelers. Just took a wrong turn and ended up here in Twelve."

"Twelve's a nice place though," his sister says, wandering over to see what the commotion is. "Mama and Papa are here in Twelve, and Aunt Effie and Uncle Haymitch."

"Wasn't always," Lucy Gray says. "Back before..."

"That's enough, Lucy," Sejanus says, putting a hand on her arm. "Don't scare her. They'll learn when they're ready."

"Before what? Before the war? I hear Mama and Papa talking about a war sometimes, when they think I'm not listening. I can hear really good."

"Never mind that, now."

"How- how long've you been in Twelve then, Lucy Gray?" she asks, childlike curiousity evident on her face.

"Eh. Long time. No time. It's not nice, it's not perfect, but it's home."

If the children were confused, they didn't show it. "You should probably get back to your parents now, little ones. They'll be worried," Sejanus interjected.

"Good-bye!" the boy calls. "S'nice meeting you!" They run back to their mother and father, laughing and racing each other there.

Lucy Gray smiles contentedly. "They'll be all right here, won't they now?"

"Yeah. Yeah, they will," Sejanus agrees, as the noonday sun turns the meadow gold.


End file.
